The present invention is directed to the delivery of data via a wireless connection and, more particularly, to the accurate delivery of data at high rates via a wireless connection.
The demand for services in which data is delivered via a wireless connection has grown in recent years and is expected to continue to grow. Included are applications in which data is delivered via cellular mobile telephony or other mobile telephony, personal communications systems (PCS) and digital or high definition television (HDTV). Though the demand for these services is growing, the channel bandwidth over which the data may be delivered is limited. Therefore, it is desirable to deliver data at high speeds over this limited bandwidth in an efficient, as well as cost effective, manner.
A known approach for efficiently delivering high speed data over a channel is by using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). The high-speed data signals are divided into tens or hundreds of lower speed signals that are transmitted in parallel over respective frequencies within a radio frequency (RF) signal that are known as sub-carrier frequencies (“sub-carriers”). The frequency spectra of the sub-carriers overlap so that the spacing between them is minimized. The sub-carriers are also orthogonal to each other so that they are statistically independent and do not create crosstalk or otherwise interfere with each other. As a result, the channel bandwidth is used much more efficiently than in conventional single carrier transmission schemes such as AM/FM (amplitude or frequency modulation), in which only one signal at a time is sent using only one radio frequency, or frequency division multiplexing (FDM), in which portions of the channel bandwidth are not used so that the sub-carrier frequencies are separated and isolated to avoid inter-carrier interference (ICI).
Further, each block of data is converted into parallel form and mapped into each subcarrier as frequency domain symbols. To get time domain signals for transmission, an inverse discrete Fourier transform or its fast version, IFFT, is applied to the symbols. The symbol duration is much longer than the length of the channel impulse response so that inter-symbol interference is avoided by inserting a cyclic prefix for each OFDM symbol. Thus, OFDM is much less susceptible to data loss caused by multipath fading than other known techniques for data transmission. Also, the coding of data onto the OFDM sub-carriers takes advantage of frequency diversity to mitigate loss from frequency-selective fading if FEC is applied.
In addition to having greater spectral efficiency i.e., more bps/Hz, than conventional transmission schemes, the OFDM spectral efficiency is further enhanced because the spectrum can be made to look like a rectangular window so that all frequencies are similarly utilized. Moreover, OFDM is less sensitive to timing errors because the timing errors are translated to a phase offset in the frequency domain.
Another approach to providing more efficient use of the channel bandwidth is to transmit the data using a base station having multiple antennas and then receive the transmitted data using a remote station having multiple receiving antennas, referred to as Multiple Input-Multiple Output (MIMO). The data may be transmitted such there is spatial diversity between the signals transmitted by the respective antennas, thereby increasing the data capacity by increasing the number of antennas. Alternatively, the data is transmitted such that there is temporal diversity between the signals transmitted by the respective antennas, thereby reducing signal fading.
Presently, MIMO systems either are designed to transmit signals having spatial diversity or are designed to transmit signals having temporal diversity. It is therefore desirable to provide a common system that can deliver signals with either spatial diversity or temporal diversity depending on the transmission environment.
It is further desirable to provide a system that has the advantages of both an OFDM system as well as those of a MIMO system. Such a system would transmit the OFDM symbols over a plurality of channels with either spatial diversity or temporal diversity between the symbols. However, when the signals are received at the remote station, the signals may be distorted because of transmitter imperfections as well as because of environmental effects which change the frequencies of the channels and may increase the bit error rate (BER).
It is therefore desirable to provide a system in which the receiver is able to compensate for the distortions in the signal in an efficient manner.